Ko receives best paper award at MobiCom

by Nicole Capozziello

Published December 19, 2019

Steve Ko, associate professor of computer science and engineering and co-director of undergraduate studies, received a best paper award at MobiCom 2019.

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“In today’s world, we are transitioning from a single device usage paradigm to a multi-device one, and in this new paradigm, users should be able to use all their devices seamlessly together.”
Steve Ko, associate professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Steve Ko.

Steven Ko, associate professor of computer science and engineering.

ACM MobiCom, an annual conference sponsored by ACM SIGMOBILE (Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing), is dedicated to addressing challenges in the areas of mobile computing and wireless networking. 2019 marked the conference’s 25th year. MobiCom is also one of the top publication venues in the field of mobile computing.

The paper, entitled “FLUID: Flexible User Interface Distribution for Ubiquitous Multi-device Interaction," presents a new system which enables users to distribute an Android app’s user interface (UI) across multiple devices. Existing solutions such as Chromecast only allow users to cast an entire screen from one device to another; FLUID enables users to move individual UI elements across different devices. For example, a user can move Instagram Live’s chatting UI to a smartphone while watching a live video on a tablet.

“In today’s world, we are transitioning from a single device usage paradigm to a multi-device one, and in this new paradigm, users should be able to use all their devices seamlessly together,” says Ko. “Our system enables something that was not possible before---allowing users to place individual UI elements on different devices as they see fit. It occupies a unique point in the design space for multi-device systems.”

The research and development was done in collaboration with KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The researchers have made the prototype of the system open source, making it possible for other people to experiment with the system.

 “For several years, our CSE department has been consistently ranked at the top nationwide in the field of mobile systems,” says Chunming Qiao, SUNY Distinguished Professor and department chair. “Winning the best paper award at this leading conference in the field is further evidence of our top-ranked status.”

MobiCom ’19 took place in Los Cabos, Mexico from Oct. 21-25, 2019.